It was, all in all, a model document. Owen’s argument was easy to follow; his prose clear and candid. There were arresting passages. For example: ‘It is, to put it mildly, unusual when inquiring into a death to have available lengthy transcripts of interviews with the deceased, conducted shortly before his death.’ Or: ‘It is apparent that Mr Litvinenko was not mourned long in Russia, at least not by the government.’ There were outings for Latinate words: sometimes a fact would ‘fortify’ his reasoning; Litvinenko faced ‘posthumous opprobrium’.
Beyond this, one got the sense of a strong judicial personality working calmly through the evidence. It was evidence, Owen made clear, that led him to the view that Kovtun and Lugovoi were murderers. When the evidence was inconclusive he found in Russia’s favour: he couldn’t conclude, on the facts available, that Moscow had deliberately frustrated Scotland Yard’s inquiries. The Met had ‘painstakingly pieced together’ the last weeks of Litvinenko’s life, using conventional methods as well as ‘unprecedented sources’, like alpha radiation.
Much hinged on what precisely happened in London. The judge accepted that Lugovoi and Kovtun’s refusal to give oral evidence to the inquiry didn’t necessarily mean they killed Litvinenko. But he took a dim view of the contradictory accounts they’d given over the years. He dismissed these versions – one of which had Litvinenko grabbing the Pine Bar teapot, and gulping down two cups of tea – as having ‘serious deficiencies’. They were consistent with ‘a deliberate attempt to mislead’.
Owen found that one or both men had lied about important details. In an interview with the German tabloid Bild, Lugovoi claimed the Pine Bar was fitted out with surveillance equipment (‘he was lying’). Lugovoi said that Litvinenko had repeatedly rung him (‘it’s plain from the telephone schedule that Mr Lugovoi and Mr Kovtun were wrong about this’). The judge dismissed too Kovtun’s ‘elaborate’ explanation as to why he called C2, the cook, in London. Kovtun claimed he wanted to offer C2 a job at a Moscow fish restaurant (‘a tissue of lies’; ‘fabricated’).
By contrast, Owen found the testimony given by D3, Kovtun’s Hamburg restaurant manager friend, to be credible: ‘Mr Kovtun’s boast that he was planning to poison Mr Litvinenko with “a very expensive poison” may have appeared outlandish to D3, but there is a wealth of independent evidence before me that shows that that is exactly what he was planning to do.’ He went on: ‘Making unwise comments is something Mr Kovtun appears to have done from time to time.’
Again and again, the report returned to the polonium trail. The forensic evidence was ‘highly compelling’, the judge found. In part six, under the question ‘Who administered the poison?’, he ruled that the two Russians had indeed handled Po-210 in three of their London hotel rooms. They had even got into a ‘routine’ connected with the ‘preparation and/or disposal’ of the poison. In the Millennium and Best Western hotels, the ‘natural inference’ was that they had tipped it ‘down the sink’.
Sometimes Owen made no finding, especially if the subject was on the margin of his inquiry. If the judge didn’t know something he said so. One intriguing example: when Litvinenko arrived at the Millennium Hotel, Lugovoi made a six-minute call to Vladimir Voronoff. Voronoff was an ex-Soviet ‘diplomat’ who was based in the early 1990s at the Soviet embassy in London. He is now a British citizen. His testimony to the inquiry was evasive. Why the call? ‘It is unexplained,’ Owen wrote.
The other central part was nine – ‘Who directed the killing?’ Owen ruled out many of the fantastical theories supplied by Moscow: Berezovsky, the mafia, Chechens and the UK’s own spy agencies. There were ‘several reasons’, however, why the Kremlin might want him dead, not least the ‘undoubted personal dimension’ to Litvinenko and Putin’s antagonism. A core theme was Litvinenko’s claim that the FSB carried out the 1999 apartment bombings (‘an area of particular sensitivity for the Putin administration’). The judge said he was satisfied that by 2006, Putin, the FSB, and those around, ‘had motives for taking action’.
But what had prompted them to act? Owen diverged from Emmerson’s view: that there was a causative link between Litvinenko’s scandalous Ivanov report and his subsequent murder. ‘The difficulty is in the timing,’ the judge noted. Litvinenko gave Lugovoi his report in late September 2006; it was only a matter of days afterwards that Lugovoi and Kovtun made arrangements for their first trip to London. Still, Owen conceded that the Ivanov dossier ‘may have provided extra motivation and impetus to a plan that had already been conceived’.
It was more likely, in his view, that the plot to assassinate Litvinenko was cooked up earlier, possibly much earlier. Lugovoi had first flown to London to meet with Litvinenko as far back as October 2004. Owen: ‘I regard it is entirely possible that Mr Lugovoi was already at that stage involved in a plan to target Mr Litvinenko, perhaps with a view to killing him.’ There was ‘no evidence at all’ that either Kovtun or Lugovoi had ‘any personal reason’ for murder. Someone else had directed the ‘protracted and costly operation’.
From the High Court, the protagonists minus Sir Robert headed across Holborn to Gray’s Inn Road and the offices of Matrix Chambers, Emmerson’s law firm. Here, Marina and Anatoly gave a small press conference. Marina thanked her son for his ‘extraordinary support’. She said she found the government’s non-response to Owen’s report unpersuasive. Yes, Russia played a role in international relations. But this was no reason to ignore the judge’s ‘very important message’, she said.
Emmerson pointed out that David Cameron had always taken a tough line on terrorism, promising that he had ‘zero tolerance’ for this modern scourge. It appeared, the QC suggested, that Cameron was only tough on terrorism done by non-state actors.
‘It would be surprising if the prime minister, who prides himself in keeping London safe from terrorism, could sit on his hands in the face of a judicial finding of state-sponsored terrorism. I don’t think the British people think this is the right outcome.’ As it was, he risked looking cowardly. ‘It would be the abdication of his responsibility to do the thing which is the first function of a state: to keep its citizens safe.’
Others, including Bill Browder, said the UK government was making an error that might later haunt it. In a letter to the prime minister, Browder argued: ‘Had this attack been perpetrated by Isis or al-Qaida there would be bombing runs, huge intelligence operations and pledges to never let it happen again.’ Cameron’s analysis was wrong: ‘Putin and others like him look for weakness wherever they can find it.’ The government’s inaction, he wrote, would embolden Putin and ‘surely lead to more killings on British soil’.
In the wake of Owen’s report there was recognition that neither of Litivnenko’s killers would face a jail cell in the near future. ‘It would only be possible after the final fall of Vladimir Putin. It’s inconceivable he could send them for trial after he sent them to commit a murder,’ Emmerson said. And what about Putin? Might he stand trial in the international court? The short answer, according to Emmerson, was no.
The lawyer had a word of caution, though. ‘History shows us that political sands shift. People who seem invincible suddenly find themselves on the receiving end of an indictment. Mr Putin is not in a position to sit comfortably.’
In the meantime, Marina was going to sue the Russian government in London. Inevitably, Moscow would claim state immunity. Nevertheless, Emmerson thought, there was a reasonable chance of success. She would also revive a 2007 claim made against the Kremlin in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. To anyone who had been following the case, it was obvious that Marina was broke. She had, for some years, been living on a pittance. She was entitled to compensation from Russia, Emmerson said. He added that MI6 hadn’t made her an ex gratia payment.